Do I like the game? Let me answer that with a little anecdote.

On Thursday, I walked into the local electronics store to buy a pack of batteries for my 360 controller because I’m also playing Mass Effect apparently, and I suck at it. A lot. But anyway, there I was, at the store, batteries in hand and. There! On the very top of the shelves, what’s that? Why, it’s a Lightning action figure! A really, really awesome Lightning action figure. Five minutes later, I was walking home 30 Euro poorer but with a really awesome Lightning action figure in my backpack.

There was a Snow figure too and I’m telling you, I was very, very tempted. But I didn’t have quite enough money on me and would have felt a bit too dorky buying two of these. (It would’ve fit though – Snow is a big dorky puppy.) I’m still kind of tempted though and it’s probably good that right now, the only figures that are out are Lightning, Snow and Vanille, because who knows if I could resist a Fang, Sazh or Hope? Will have to resist buying one of those in June.

(Why yes, I love action figures. I just feel bad spending money on them, which… I realise is silly on some level, because I can afford it and other people buy expensive clothes or whatever, Maybe I should just buy Snow anyway, because looking at Lightning on my shelf makes me as happy as… well, as I suppose some people are when they look at a nice painting on their wall, or new curtains.)

… What do you mean, I went off on a tangent? As if I didn’t do that every day anyway.

But my point is, I love this game.
Which is more of a surprise than it seems to be, actually: Yes, I squeed at pretty trailers and had high expectations because it’s the thirteenth entry in a series that has never once disappointed me, but even though, none of the characters immediately hooked me from watching the trailers the way the Final Fantasy XII cast did. And the first two or so hours of the game were mainly confusing in their fast-paced, In Medias Res, Baby! way. And now I love these characters so much I dream of owning a set of action figures of them.

I would go into more detail, but I want to avoid spoilers for now. So let me just say that they all end up feeling very, very real. (Not that you’d be able to tell that from their portrayal early on.) Unsurprisingly, they all have their conflicts, with themselves and each other and the world around them, and up until now the better part of the game has been dedicated to pure character development. I’ve heard people complaining about the pacing in the game’s first half, but I really enjoy watching these characters interact and act and change.

The party also has a habit of splitting up in different combinations and we follow each of them at some point or another, see things from their perspective and control them in battle. Needles to say, that, and the occasional flashback to the days before the events of chapter one, gives us a very good impression on who these people are, and when it comes down to it, each of them (hmm, okay, Vanille not quite as much, yet) resonates with me on some level, and there’s something about all of them that’s just so… relevant to my interests, for lack of a better word. XD

And they’re very much not a team. Yet. Of course they’re getting there little by little, but it feels like, hmm… because they have so many reasons not to (want to) work with each other that they have to overcome first that it feels like once they all pull themselves together, they’ll be a stronger team for it. And I just love that.

I also love that the characters are always relatable (and by extension believable), even when they are not necessarily likeable. Hope is a very good example of that. I love the boy to itty bitty pieces (but by now we have established that I’m just here to gush over the party a lot) but oh does he have headdesk moments. But I could always understand why. These characters and their motivations, and thus their actions, just make sense. That’s how it should be and that’s why I keep repeating myself and say again that that’s why I love them.

Lightning is sitting on my shelf, muahaha! thankfully more than “a female Cloud” and somehow gets more awesome the more sides of her we see. Maybe she should stop punching her future party members in the face though. (The first time it happens, the one on the receiving end is Snow and it says something about their conflict that I found myself cheering for both sides, doesn’t it?)

Snow is, as I have said, a big doofy puppy (and his smooshy romance moments with Serah were a lot more adorable than I thought they would be) who has a hero-complex and more depth than he’d want you to think. But mainly, he’s a puppy.

The irony of Hope “We are all going to die and this is not going to end well and WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!” Estheim is not lost on the rest of the party, but things are looking up. Also, I’ve just met Hope’s dad. I love Hope’s dad something fierce. (Didn’t expect that from the trailers. I still thinks he looks more like a Cid than the game’s actual Cid though. XD)

Sazh was feared by many to be a Black Character Ohemgee! stereotype but after the “Hi, I’m the comic relief!” first hour or so he sidesteps that nicely. (Not to mention that I’d argue that he isn’t the comic relief. He’s just sometimes the straight man to the insanity around him, which is hardly the same.) Haven’t had him or Vanille in my party for a while, but I can’t wait to get back to them; the bits with Dahj have me intrigued.

Vanille is the overly-cheerful girl who hides A Dark Secret behind her constant smile and so we technically don’t know much of “the real her” aside from what her secret actually is. (It’s “foreshadowed” so heavily that I can’t not assume that the game meant for the player to figure it out way ahead of time. Case in point, when it’s finally revealed, it isn’t treated as a big revelation.)

And Fang… Fang is apparently the awesomely sarcastic Knight In Shining Armour for Vanille and I ship them like it’s my job. I want more. Moooooooore!

Uhm, yeah. That’s it for now, I guess. I could also gush over the battle system for a bit (it starts as press-x-to-win and the game takes its sweet time until it introduces more, but once chapter 3 comes around and with it abilities, paradigms, the Crystarium and other fancy terms (strategy!), it gets pretty exciting) but I’ll just leave it at that and dedicate this post fully to Final Fantasy XIII‘s characters.

Who are nothing short of amazing. Smooshy love declaration over. (Yes, I realise that I haven’t actually said much about them at all, and maybe I’ll do that in a future post that’ll thus give some minor character spoilers. But right now everyone seems to be rather desperate to go into the game as unspoiled as possible, so…)

I’ve only played up to the first official save point and there’s already two pages of the illegible scribbles I call notes, so I figured I could just as well type them all in before I stop being able to decypher them properly and present you with my squeeful babbling about the beginning of Ace Attorney Investigations. I’m sure you’re all very happy about the existence of cuts and will tolerate me going “eeeeeeeeee, Miles!” all over my journal. Just don’t expect anything resembling a coherent post. Mainly, I just go “kyaaaaa” a whole lot.

(Warning: Includes a few vague(ish) spoilers for the PW trilogy.)

“This tea set was very dear to my heart.”

- Kyaaaaa, the button you press to advance text is PINK! Or, well, whatever colour Miles’s jacket is. I could never tell.

- Upon entering his office: “What’s this smell? It’s very familiar… blood?” I know it’s because he sees crime scenes with startling regularity, but that wasn’t what I thought of first, let me tell you.

- Kyaaaaa, Miles’s sprite is ridiculously adorable! And he drops his fancy suitcase when he finds the body. (Details! I’m still getting used to to seeing my narrator’s sprite run around (as opposed to seeing out-of-courtroom investigations from the 1st person POV as in the other games), but it adds such nice details!)

- Oh damnit, he’s way too calm with a gun pointed at him. [when the UNSUB guy with the gun shoots the jacket/frame off the wall] “Is that a threat?” Guess who doesn’t even blink? [a sentence later] “No one gets away with committing murder in my office. No one.” He takes that personally, huh? That’s his principles the murderer’s aiming at, and that’s the one thing Miles wont compromise on. (What about his life?)

- Kyaaaaa, Gumshoe follows me around like a lost puppy RPG character. XD Kyaaaa, he wants to play chess with Miles even though he’s only good at checkers. And Miles agrees to set aside time for it anyway after the case is closed!

- Heh. So Gumshoe was working hard to keep the office spotless in Miles’s absence? (who notes somewhat irritatedly that he never asked him to do that) And he’s watering the plants. I wonder if he gave them any names. Like Charley. And he sets aside half of his Saturday for office cleaning? (“Does he have a life?” asks Miles. Uh, you’re not one to talk, you know.) Also, we have our first mention of earthquakes already when Gumshoe says that he packed the files in the shelves so tightly together that not even an earthquake could make them fall off. Of course that’s our first clue towards the flaw in the “they fell out during the struggle between victim and murderer” argument.

- Miles, about/to his desk: “Oh, how I’ve missed you.” (compare to Phoenix, who says he rarely ever sat behind his) And why is it so shiny? “It’s my job to protect your office, sir!” says Gumshoe. “And,” answers Miles, “you did such a good job protecting it that a murder occurred in it.”

- Be careful, there’s splinters from a tea set on the floor! “Nnnnngh…” – “You’re really mad about this, are you?” – “This tea set was very dear to my heart. It can only be bought in England and cost more than your monthly pay check.” – ” Grrr, now I feel like the murderer wasted one of my pay checks!” (*sighs* I would say that being such a tea snob is the only good thing he picked up from his mentor, but then again, his past does help him to do his job.)

- about his “King of Prosecutors” trophy: “I have no interest in the worth of other people. As for my own worth, that is something only I can determine for myself.” ♥

- Kyaaaaa, he has a Steel Samurai action figure in his office! Of course, when Gumshoe asks him, he says he “doesn’t know much about it” only to rattle off facts about the franchise. XD Gumshoe even wonders if Miles is not some kind of “rabid fanboy.” I love geeky!Miles. Pfffft, he even says Steel Samurai trivia is common knowledge for anyone in touch with society. XD (Also: With anyone else, I would complain about inconsistency, because Gumshoe was assigned to not one but two investigations in the past that had connections to the Steel Samurai universe, but then again, it’s Gumshoe. He forgets stuff like that.)

- Ahahahaha, flowers from Wendy Oldbag! “Isn’t that the lady with the strange voice who’s stalk…” – “Don’t remind me. *shudders*” Gumshoe remembers her, but not (one of) the case(s) she was connected to. XD

- Oooh, and now we find what might or might not be the murder weapon! “To think it’s that easy, to take a life with just the pull of a trigger.” You know a thing or two about guns and triggers, do you, Miles?

- Lampshade hanging! Gumshoe gives an “As You Know Bob” exposition about the “Logic” system (and the second one even!) (And you know what? With their different styles of investigations, our Ace Attorney protagonists could open up their very own profiling unit.). Miles’s answer? “Yes, which is why this exercise in explaining my own method to me was unnecessary.”

- Oooh, the prosecutor’s badge. It gives as a couple shiny quotes.
[Inventory] “Proof of my profession. However, I prefer to keep it in my pocket.” (compare, of course, to Nick, who shows his to everyone who stands still for two seconds)
[present to Gumshoe] “Your prosecutor’s badge is really tiny compared to my police badge. Oh, but, uhm… it’s really cool, sir! Much, much cooler than my badge could ever be!” – “You don’t need to suck up to me, Detective.”
[Inventory details, front] Miles waxes poetically about the meaning of his badge, just to say at the end that he doesn’t care much for identifying himself as a prosecutor.
[Inventory details, back] “Each prosecutor’s badge is engraved with the numbers of its owner on the back. Hmpf. As if we’re not human on the inside like everybody else.” Oh, Miles. You remember all too well that you were once called Demon Prosecutor, and you’re not proud of it. Come on. *pokes* I know it comes with a lot of baggage for you, but take pride in your profession again, will you? That’d be a nice bit of character development for this game.

- By the way. Now that we know how much of a clusterfuck his first case as a prosecutor was, it makes me wonder why he keeps the jacket he wore that day framed on his office’s wall. As we’ve seen, it’s not exactly something he’s proud of either.

- “Did I say ‘contradiction’? He must be rubbing off on me. I’m starting to sound like him…” (Yes. You did that in 3×5 too. XD) Good to hear that it’s not just the bad things that are a constant presence in his mind but Nick too. ♥

- … … … “Eureka!”? Seriously?!

- And now Gumshoe is worried about possible hidden cameras in the office. “Do I even want to know what he’s been doing in my room?”

- Kyaaaaa, Maggey! Socute! ♥

- Come to think of it, why did Miles go to his office anyway? It’s the middle of the night and he apparently just came back from a month-long trip elsewhere/overseas. Miles. Don’t you have a home to go back to?

- Also, I found most of this first part wondering why nobody was trying to pin the murder on Edgeworth himself, as he was the one who found the body. Usually, Ace Attorney Land is so quick to jump to the conclusion that “prime witness = murderer!”…

An introduction to ToS’s playable characters, plus some of the reasons why I love them. Contains some spoilers, but keeping its plot twists secret isn’t the game’s strongest point to begin with.

There’s Lloyd, our enthusiastic protagonist/player character who has the attention span of an eccentric sponge (He’s always super enthusiastic about something new, but don’t ask him about it a day later. Sounds like somebody you know?) but who is also the one who sometimes has the most practical ideas. (I fell in love with the character when, back near the beginning of the game, everyone is going on and on about how “Colette is turning into an angel” and how she will get awesome super powers and save the world and all that, and there’s a skit (an optional conversation) in which Lloyd proclaims that really, the whole angel business is really rather impractical. After all, it means that Colette will have to cut holes into all of her clothes for the wings, and getting dressed/undressed will be such a hassle! XD)
He lost his mother at an early age (which is, of course, plot-relevant) and was raised by a dwarf according to the Dwarven Vows (Dwarven Vow number six: “Justice and Love will always win!”) and this is also where he gets his knack with metal work from. Lloyd can be reckless and so it’s no surprise that his fighting style features two swords and no shield.

There’s Genis, who absorbed all the booksmarts and left none for Lloyd. At age twelve, he already has a recommendation for the world’s finest university but decides that he wants to accompany Colette (and Lloyd, and eventually everyone else) on their world-saving journey instead. He’s bright and clever and sometimes so busy being older than his years that he forgets to be a child, but when he’s teasing Lloyd or falling asleep on Raine’s lap, he shows his age.
Like… pretty much every fricking person in your party, he has a tendency to blame himself for things that are not in any way his fault and often gravitates towards other party members for that reason. (Regal being the most obvious example; they get very thoughtful skits together later on.) He is best friends with Lloyd, who is closest to him in age, but is also known to form very touching friendships with older people, like the elderly woman Marble from the nearby “Human Ranch” (where humans are enslaved) or, again, Regal. Genis is the party’s blackmage (but when enemies gets too close, he whacks them over the head with a kendama).

There’s Colette, the Chosen of Regeneration, whose fate it is to travel and open seals in temples all over the world in order to become an angel and save the world. Despite being the prophesied heroine, she has the unfortunate habit of thinking of herself as a burden for her friends and everyone around her and tries very hard not to be, to the point of becoming a walking “Boy Who Cried Wolf” – she says “I’m fine” so often, and even when she’s not, that it is eventually hard for people to believe her even when she is telling the truth.
She is friendly, loves dogs (one of the sidequests is to talk to every dog in the worlds with Colette and give all of them a name) and will politely but very firmly stand up against any injustice she sees. As her Journey of World Regeneration goes on, she gets more and more angel powers and looses more and more of her senses, to the point where she can no longer feel pain, or speak, or tell hot from cold. (Her journey covers only the first third or so of the game though.) Colette fights with chakrams and Holy-themed spells and is also potentially the party’s strongest close-range fighter.

There’s Raine, Genis’s older sister and the teacher for him, Lloyd, Colette and the other children and teenagers in their little village. She’s where Genis gets his booksmarts from and a hopeless geek when it comes to archaeology and long-forgotten languages. Very short-tempered when you try to drag her away from her discoveries, she nonetheless cares about her friends, but where they are ready to trust strangers immediately, she tends to be weary of other people and their potential hidden motives. (One could also call this common sense; after all someone has to speak up when the kids are happily welcoming the assassin who came to kill Colette into the party when Colette herself is being all “Let’s be friends! ♥”) She is also the only one suspicious of Kratos and challenges him whenever he last expects it, trying to figure out what his secrets are. (On my recent playthough, I find myself kind of shipping them. What?) She’s intelligent, careful and mindful of possible consequences, but don’t count on that if you go too far… Raine is the party’s healer.

There’s Kratos, Mysterious Mercenary With A Past (and how!) who randomly (or not, obviously) meets the group early on and sells his services to protect the Chosen. What he certainly didn’t seem to expect was to run into Lloyd there, whom he grudgingly starts tutoring, seeming strangely affectionate even as he does his best to keep his distance. (This is of course where Lloyd’s mysterious parentage come in, but psssst. It’s supposed to be an end-game spoiler.) He’s the perfect image of a calm, collected professional who answers the kids’ idealism with a bitter (rueful?) smile, but every now and then, we see the cracks in his façade. And of course then there’s the end of Colette’s journey 1/3 into the plot and him turning on the party… or does he? “Conflicted” doesn’t begin to describe the man, and remember what I said in Genis’s paragraph about the party members’ bad habit? Kratos is another close-range fighter, wielding a sword and shield combination.

There’s Sheena, who came all the way from a different world just to kill Colette. Not that she particularly wants to kill Colette, really, but it’s not easy, trying to save the world… She’s one of those people who try to hide that they’re really fundamentally good people and can best be described as “driven” even as she learns to trust. Torn between running from her past (and a past failure) and going back to face it, she finds that she could not live with herself if she were as heartless as she tried to tell herself she was. Sheena is the party’s summoner, forming pacts with spirits and using cards in battle when she isn’t calling upon them.

There’s Zelos, also from a different world and best-known for being his world’s Chosen of Regeneration. But in a world that does not yet need saving, what is a Chosen to do with his time? Flirt his way through the female population of the capital, apparently. Appearances aside, he actually knows how to use that pretty head of his and while he is originally sent to accompany the party to keep an eye on them, he’d rather make up his own mind about them. Easy-going and cheerfully confident, he (like everyone else…) does of course have both a dark secret and a more serious side to go with it. (I fell in love with the character when they reach the Great Bridge and everyone sees that it’s powered by Ex Spheres and therefore calls it horrible, and it’s Zelos who points out that considering what Ex Spheres are, it’s quite insensible to call them “horrible.”) In battle, Zelos is nearly identical to Kratos even though the characters aren’t actually connected to each other. There is a reason for it of course…

There’s Regal (same different world) who comes to the party in prison clothes and with his hands bound and who insists on wearing both even when Lloyd offers to open the shackles for him. His name implies nobility and Zelos even recognises him as such, yet he insists that that’s a right he forfeited when he committed murder. (Here’s where Genis comes in, being the one who keeps approaching Regal, saying that he might understand him a little.) With his hands tied as they are, Regal fights with his legs. (Lloyd thinks practical, part 136: Does he also cook with his feet? Cooking is part of the game mechanics.)

There’s Presea, an emotionless, pink-haired little girl, and the only thing about that sentence that is actually true is that she has pink hair. Her big themes are reaching out to the world and dealing with time that was taken from her and that she isn’t going to get back. Ever. Presea fights with a giant axe.

These characters and their development might all sound fairly predictable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re all so thoroughly likeable (even when they’re not), and I haven’t even mentioned the two or three other memorable recurring characters (including the main villain – guess who he makes friends with?). So yeah. That’s why I play Tales of Symphonia, not for the plot, but for the characters (and the fun gameplay, of course), and here are a couple (okay, there’s 49) icons I made from the opening cinematic. (Not that the video hasn’t been iconed to death already, but who cares.) Feel free to use, alter or eat with ketchup. (Credit for my “work” of fiddling with recolouring tools? Is nice and appreciated, but not all that necessary.)

In which Otacon overanalyses Snake's motives so that I don't have to.

- Pressing the select button no longer brings up the codec screen. (It’s now part of the main menu you get when you press Start.) That’s the one button change that really makes me go because I liked that Select was always, always, always the Codec button – always expect once, when the support team could do nothing to help and when pressing select would set you on the Bad Ending path of the first game. (Hello euphemism!) The same button you usually use to call for help. I loved that symbolism and now it’s gone. Bawww.

- I’m… also not terribly happy with the whole Liquid thing. It was amusing enough in MS2 because damn, he’s really harder to kill than a cockroach, but couldn’t he have taken over someone who isn’t Ocelot? Sorry Liquid, but kitten is a far more effective villain than you ever were. (I will happily shut up if the game actually manages to do something interesting with Liquid, but for now I’m hoping that my intuition from MGS3 (i.e. kitten being the final boss of this game one way or another) is right and that we haven’t seen the last of Ocelot.
But honestly? I’m completely certain that we’ll see more of Ocelot too, even if he isn’t the final boss. You don’t create a character like that and bother giving him so much backstory/screentime in the prequel if you don’t intend to do anything else with him. That, and all his fancy plotting has to lead somewhere.

(And while we’re on the topic of Liquid and Ocelot, I have to admit that I never quite got why Snake is so obsessed with catching Liquid anyway. Catching Ocelot, now that would make sense, but Liquid? Oh well. As it is now, it’ll be two birds with one stone anyway.)

- Snake is now using CQC. (Which stands simply for close quarter combat but apparently stands for the specific kind of close quarter combat that is generally associated with Big Boss and which we’ve seen him use in MGS3.) I wondered briefly why he’d start now when he hadn’t used any in the previous games (Yeah, I know, he didn’t because it wasn’t programmed in. I mean from a character standpoint.) but forgot about it again until Otacon brought it up in the only Codec conversation so far where they don’t focus exclusively on Plot or the battle system. Otacon remarks that by now, everyone is using CQC, and for half a sentence I saw myself writing a paragraph about it in my next MGS post, overanalysing that line and stating that I believe that the reason why Snake does it now of all times is because now it’s no longer just Big Boss’s signature but as it turns out, I don’t have to: Otacon comes up with the same explanation.

“Because it’s no longer just his.” Because it’s no longer something that Snake associates exclusively with his mentor. Because it no longer just means using an ability taught to him by a mentor who betrayed him. Snake doesn’t quite deny that but has his own explanation too: Everyone is using it, but they’re not as good at it than he himself is because they learned it by reading about it while he learned it by doing, from Big Boss himself. Hello, seemingly ongoing motif of the game! (see also: soldiers with experience and soldiers with nanomachines)

- Damnit, I knew I should’ve paid more attention to Meryl in the first game. Why is she “still wearing the Foxhound logo?” Why would she wear it in the first place, considering that’s where the first game’s villains, and Big Boss himself, came from? Because it was also her uncle’s father’s unit? Because it was also Snake’s?

- Somewhere in their Plot-related conversation, Drebin teases Snake, “Scared of needles?” I actually told my TV “Yeah, we’re a leetle bit apprehensive about them.” out loud. XD (Well, I’m not, but of course Snake would be. Hello Naomi and FoxDie, how are you today?)

What is it with all this da-da-da-doooooming, by the way? The ad on the back of the box is all “A last mission. The greatest sacrifice. The final chapter in the life of this exceptional hero.” but you know what? The more it’s trying to convince me of the opposite, the more certain I am that the *cough* exceptional hero *cough* is going to survive the game. Or maybe I’m just in denial sticking my fingers in my ears an go “lalelulelola, I can’t heeeeaaaar yooouuu!” We’ll see. For now, welcome to a few notes about Act 1.

Sunny has two daddies.

The loading screen:
Yes, I’m serious. That thing deserves its own section. Or, well, technically it’s just the loading screen that’s displayed when you install the game onto your PS3: Snake’s seen standing around, smoking a cigarette, while the usual health and other assorted warnings (“Don’t play the game when you’re tired,” “Please make sure the room you’re playing in is brightly lit” etc.) are displayed next to him. There’s even a warning about smoking being hazardous to your health. It’s seven kinds of hilarious. XD (Snake, you old chain smoker. You got through three cigarettes and started a fourth by the time the installation was finished!) It is, however, slightly less hilarious when you’ve spent eight minutes staring at the warnings and Snake and realise how goddamn tired he looks.

Opening movie:
Scene: The cemetery where The Boss’s grave is, by now covered in the flowers from the MGS3 final battle against her. (The entire place, not just her grave) Hello Snake. Fancy suit you have there! But, uh, what exactly are you doing here? It’s not like the place has any special meaning for you… in fact, you shouldn’t even know about it! It’s, what? The grave of your mentor’s mentor? [Note: We do find out in a codec conversation later that Big Boss's story/the events of MGS3 seem to have become a part of pop culture in the last year or so, so Snake knowing something about it makes some sense, but still.] And– uh, Snake? What are you planning to do with that gun?

Oh no you won’t. Mark my words. *stares* *stares more* *stares very convincingly* It’s not like the MGS series as a whole is allergic to Happy Ends. It loves bittersweet endings, true, but such a downer ending? Pfffft. As if.

Mission Briefing:
Did anyone else watch the mission briefing and realise ten minutes later that they had absolutely no idea of the plot they’ve just been expositioned to death with because they were to busy going “awwww!” in Sunny’s general direction? Seriously, she’s adorable… and apparently a little computer whiz too. (She did grew up around Otacon after all. XD) Though I have to say that Snake and Uncle Hal aren’t winning any Best Parents Ever awards here and I hope they’re less negligent when Plot isn’t knocking at their door. <.< As it is, they pretty much completely ignore her when she tries to bring them something to eat, no matter how earnestly she tries.

So, they're… currently living on a plane, yes? And they have chickens that lay eggs that Sunny will then try to cook (sunny side up, of course *g*) and apparently the chickens are named Liquid and Solidus? Oh yey. And have I mentioned the adorableness that is Sunny? When she finds the full ashtray in the room upstairs and one of the cigarettes falls to the floor, she pounces and stamps on it before it can roll away and I can't be the only one who grinned and thought of Big Boss's stunt with the cigar, also on a plane. XD And then she goes and yells at Snake for smoking again, and stutters only a little when she does it.

(How old is Sunny, by the way? She should be six or seven, right, given that Olga was pregnant with her in the MGS2 prologue (2007) and that MGS4 takes place in, what was it, 2014? And she's been living with our two Philantrophists (does their organisation still exist, I wonder?) since she was about two. Must be interesting.)

There's an earlier scene, also with Snake in that same fancy black suit, also near The Boss's grave, where Otacon arrives with a helicopter and announces that The Plot has found them Colonel Campbell has something he wants to talk to them about. The conversation takes a brief detour when Snake asks about “the test results” and we find out about the whole accelerated ageing process thing, and that they know of no way to stop it, and that Snake has at most another year to live.

I love the direction of that scene. There’s Otacon who has his back turned to Snake and who, even when he turns to face him, can’t meet his eyes when he tells him about the results. Who can’t even bring himself to say the words out loud. It’s Snake who does, who looks at his now wrinkled hand and says “A year at best, right?” It’s all Otacon can do to confirm that and for a moment he just sounds so utterly defeated. No wonder he wants to grasp at straws a second later, tells Snake and tells himself that they can always try another doctor, right, this doesn’t have to be the end. Not that Snakes wants to hear any of that. He’s tired.

Gah, I’m such a big mushball when it comes to these two and right now, they’re breaking my heart.

As for the actual plot, it looks like our cockroach villain has taken control over the kitten completely via arm possession and is now planning to do stuff somewhere and we’ve got to stop him. Uh, I mean, Liquid seems to have taken over Ocelot’s body and wants to create the world that Big Boss dreamt of back in his good ol’ villain days, were the world’s pretty much constantly at war. And oh well, I guess Snake still has some bones to pick with his obnoxious clone twin, so we’re off to another adventure. Or whatever.

Controls and Codecs:
You fire weapons with the right shoulder button. What. What is this insanity? <.< Seriously, I've played my way through the first act and I still haven't gotten used to the completely changed control scheme. I mean, it's not the mess that Portable Ops‘s was, not by a long stretch, and it looks like it’ll play pretty smoothly once I’m used to it, but it’s… different. Different enough that I still find myself crawling around on the floor when I want to sneakily shoot some poor NPC. Whoops.

But: Cutscenes can now be paused! \o/ That makes up for almost everything. (I’m still wondering who thought it was a good idea to make you push Start at the loading screen after it has, well, finished loading to proceed to the following scene.)

So far, Snake has exactly one codec contact, and of course it’s Otacon. He is, however, no longer our safe person. What. WHAT. This. What is this. This is even stranger than the new button configurations. We no longer have safe persons. We save via the pause menu. Game! You can’t do that! I liked safe persons and all their implications! (see also: what I’ve said about this topic in my first MGS2 post)

As it turns out, I am just as worried when there’s no silly banter on the codec between Snake and Otacon as I am when Garcia from Criminal Minds has no witty remarks for her teammates on the phone. It just makes me want to give everyone involved a big hug and tell them that everything is going to be all right, because when Garcia isn’t joking, and when Snake and Otacon aren’t teasing each other, we know it’s bad.
I miss the “lighter” coded calls between those two from MGS2. I understand why they’re not there and it makes sense, but I still miss them. At times, they sound downright aggressive when talking to each other via codec. They’re frustrated. And who could blame them.

New faces, old friends and even older foes:
I don’t really have terribly much to say about Act 1 itself. I mean, there’s not much plot; we’re mainly running around to meat up with “Rat Patrol Unit 1″ and confirm Liquid’s whereabouts while we’re introduced to new gameplay mechanics and see how the world has changed in the last seven years. Let’s do bullet points for this one.

- The “Metal Gear Mk.II,” aka the little robot that Otacon built to have it follow Snake around on the battlefield is beyond adorable. (And I was glad for the scene it was introduced in because the clinical tone of the preceding codec calls had me worried; but the affection in their voices during the Mk.II conversation was clear as day.)

- Drebin is probably a walking Unfortunate Implication (what with him being both one of the few black characters in the series and a weapons dealer), but I quite like him anyway. For all that it makes him rich, he doesn’t seem all that fond of the idea of an “eternal” war after all.

- MERYL! That’s my girl! \o/ *cheers* I was somewhat neutral towards her at first in MGS1 but she quickly grew on me and I love her here. ♥ Major hearts for the rest of the Rat Patrol Unit too, even if except for Johnny, they don’t really get much character. I love how well they work together, even if it might mostly be a result of their NaNonanomachines. (Snake doesn’t like the idea behind the whole thing – 24/7 monitoring and possibly fiddling with people’s emotions to make them into more effective soldiers – and who could blame him, but, uh, I wouldn’t say it’s the soldiers’ fault that they were being born in this age.)

This is, by the way, the point where we all pretend that it didn’t take me the first five minutes of the Rat Patrol scenes to remember that Snake and Meryl where Designated Love Interests back in the day when they were the hero and the heroine and of MGS1. (Well, we all know how well that worked.)
The theme of Snake’s accelerated ageing and me going “:(” continues when Meryl doesn’t even recognise Snake at first. She reaches out to touch his face twice, he shies away both times (which is ore what I’d expect from Big Boss). So instead we go and talk about The Plot some more. Or about Meryl still holding a grudge against her uncle father. Or maybe more plot and exposition? Or we could introduce the rest of the team! It doesn’t get boring, that’s for sure.
tl;dr: My crush on Meryl, let me show you it.

- Cockroach!kitten shows up, says something (“Brrrrrother!”), talks to Naomi – Hello Naomi! Have you cooked up any more deadly viruses lately? – does plot-related things and leaves via helicopter, mostly because, uuuh… we can’t have our big showdown in act 1. “Plot-related thing” included, apparently, something to do with their nanomachines, or else I can’t explain why every soldier in the vicinity, including Snake, Meryl and her unit, broke down all at once.

Well, all expect for Johnny. Johnny is the one who always panics, to put it mildly. He’s the weakest link in Meryl’s unit, the one who trips over his own feet and needs to have things explained to him twice when the rest of the team has the non-verbal communication thing down pat. He’s always breaking down, so when everyone else does, he doesn’t have to. Fascinating.

- One more thing, about the general setting for this act: It’s one that’s highly unusual for MGS. We’re in the middle of a combat zone where two seemingly unrelated parties are battling each with shots being fired at all times and people yelling and screaming; it’s very different from the silence of Shadow Moses, or the plant, or even the jungle. (The jungle wasn’t necessarily silent of course, but it was tranquil.) It fits in very well with the story’s general sentiment that “war has changed” and that it’s everywhere now and if Liquid has his say, it’ll surround everyone as much as it surrounds Snake. Heh. We should better go and find that cockroach before he has any more brilliant ideas.

Act 1: Fin

General impressions:
- You might be able to make your characters look old, but the Origin Stories will still pretty much assume that you’re a teenager/young adult. Khana’s “grumpy old dwarf” was called “boy” by everyone around him and was still living with his mother… who looked at least twenty years younger than him. The Mage Origin isn’t much better and tells you outright that you’re the same age as that guy over there who’s in his early twenties. (Well, at least the Mage Origin allows you to have a character of colour and not have him stand out completely, mostly because his family is not around. The dwarf commoner’s family is, and they’re all white, regardless of his own skin colour. M-maybe he was adopted?)

- The battle system reminds me a lot of Guild Wars (and basically every other MMORPG that I’ve tried for half an hour. Never been a fan of those.) but there haven’t been terribly many battles yet. Amusing detail: I tried the Dhalish Elves Origin Story for a bit with a rogue and within one battle with a random wolf he had blood all over him. (I guess the game’s rating has to come from somewhere…) My mage? Squeaky clean, even when the Really Dangerous Spiders and various other enemies came close enough to whack them over the head with my staff.

- The voice acting I’ve heard so far is really nice! (Which is good, because there is of course a lot of spoken dialogue. Actually, every line, even one coming from a random NPC, is voiced.) I’m a bit disappointed with the lack of detail when it comes to the characters’ body language in conversation (and the few cutscenes I’ve seen), but I guess that can’t be helped. If I want detail, I can just stare at peoples’ clothes. *g*

And now let me introduce you to my character, the basic premise of his Origin Story and my thoughts on him. I will then proceed to illustrate my point with pictures. XD

Fiddling around with the character creator is seriously addictive, but eventually I came up with Yuran. Yuran is both an elf and a mage, which means that he’s… pretty much completely screwed. See, elves are discriminated against in the land of Ferelden, where our story takes places, because… because. I have yet to find out what is going on with that. And mages… well, mages once upon a time tried to become too close to god “the Maker” and ended up being turned into some kind of evil creatures. And ever since then, people don’t really trust mages.

Not that other people in Ferelden have it much better. As Khana’s grumpy dwarf showed us, caste-less dwarves also got the short end of the stick. In other words, you better hope that you’re born as a noble, and even then, The Plot will probably screw you over, but I wouldn’t know about that, and I’m here to speak about Yuran today.

When we first meet Yuran, he is about to undergo the Harrowing, the trial that all mage apprentices have to undergo before they can join the Circle of the Magi. And it’s not like they have much of a choice: The mages of the circle try to find every child that has magic and bring it to the Tower, where they will grow up and learn to control their powers. They are not allowed to even leave the building (dramaaaaa!) and if they fail the Harrowing (which is, of course, very dangerous), they’re killed by the templars immediately.
Oh, and should a mage, whether they are an apprentice or a member of the Circle, ever manage to run away from the tower or stray from the path the council has chosen from them, they will be tracked down via their blood (a sample of their blood is kept in the vaults of the tower from the moment they arrive there) and killed. Have I mentioned that they grow up confined to a single building and in constant fear of a trial in their early adulthood that they are not likely to survive?
They have one choice though: They can go through the Rite of Tranquillity that strips them of their magic – and their emotions. They will then spend the rest of their lives as servants in the tower.

Yeah, it sucks to be a mage.

In any case, we begin with Yuran’s Harrowing (which, despite being feared and incredibly dangerous, is of course extremely easy to play through, given that it’s the first thing we ever do in the game) and it’s definitely my favourite part of the Mage Origin. It’s clever, has multiple possible solution (I’d guess; it looked that way at least) and I really love Mouse, the bear. Don’t ask. While I played through this, I started wondering what kind of guy this Yuran fellow was and how I’d go about playing him. After all, I have to know this in oder to give in-character answers when people talk to him!

The first thing I learned is that for all that he doesn’t wan to judge people because he’s on the receiving end of prejudices far too often not to know how much it sucks, there is one point where he will absolutely not accept a differing opinion on: The only people he despises more than the ones that force someone to undergo the Rite of Tranquillity are the people that chose Tranquillity out of their own free will. He’s all for choices, but he can’t accept that one, even from the people who became Tranquil only because they feared their Harrowing. He feared his too. It’s no reason to throw away his emotions, he says, or is humanity. Or whatever the equivalent for elves is. You know what I mean. Even fear’s a whole lot better than not feeling at all.

…now why do I have this sneaking suspicion that he’ll get himself into trouble wanting to feel something, anything, when venturing into the wider world? *sighs*

Yuran is generally pretty easy to be around, even if he has his reservations about templars and mages of the Circle. (I was not really surprised when I had him leap at the chance to become a Grey Warden and join the main plot without a second thought.) His Harrowing has shown that he prefers riddles to combat, but he won’t hesitate to use the powers he has either.

Warning: Spoilers for the second half of the Mage Origin ahead!

After the Harrowing is over, there is more plot in the Mage Origin to play through: Yuran’s fellow apprentice, Jowan, fears that the Circle plans to make him Tranquil because they think he is a Blood Mage and eventually asks his friend for help: He wants to run away from the Tower with his girlfriend Lily, a cleric-in-training. Yuran wouldn’t be Yuran if he would want Tranquillity to happen to anyone, so he agrees to help them brake into the vault where a sample of Jowan’s blood (but not Yuran’s; now that he is a full-fledged mage, his blood sample was brought… elsewhere) is stored for tracking purposes.

You need a staff to get in there, but to get one, you need one of the older mages to sign some kind of paper for you. The game heavily pushes you in the “go ask your mentor!” direction and I did that at first. However, it then pretty much forces you to betray Jowan and Lily because oh no, Blood Magic! and only pretend to help them so that your mentor and Lily’s seniors from the church can catch them red-handed. I played on, pretty grumpy at that point because betraying them was so completely out of character for Yuran, and hoping that there was a way to warn the two others, but there wasn’t, they were caught, Jowan turned out to really be a Blood Mage, fled (while injuring a couple of templars) and there was some kind of “Okay Yuran, you did exactly what I told you and for some reason we hate you for it now!” thing going on so that Duncan could jump in and recruit him for the Grey Wardens. It really didn’t make all that much sense, not for my specific character and not for the plot as a whole.

So I restarted from an earlier save after the Harrowing, even though I’m determined not to do something like that in this game, and this time I took a detour: There’s a seemingly random NPC in the library who will, after you bother her about it long enough, admit that she messed up and let Big Dangerous Spiders into one of the store rooms, so you can agree to go on a sidequest and kill the spiders for her. She says she owes you something and will later agree to sign for you the paper you need for the staff that lets you into the vault. So you never have to go to your mentor and betray your friends, and the ending of the Origin Story also makes more sense: You are, after all, caught helping someone break the Circle’s rules, so it makes sense for them to hate you. Duncan to the rescue!

I found out more about Yuran through all this: For one, he thinks that Lily is fickle bastard (she drops him like a hot potato the moment he’s revealed to really be a Blood Mage), and that the Circle mages are hypocrites anyway, using blood to track their *cough* “lost sheep” *cough* while at the same time condemning Blood Mages. Yes, he’s read the books. He know what this kind of magic is capable of. But if we’re going to kill people for having “evil” powers, we can just as well throw the populace of the Tower to the dragons. It’s not the power that’s bad. Actually, it might be kind of… fascinating.

Have I mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of trouble this guy gets himself into now that he’s about to join the Grey Wardens and see more of the world?

But before we do all that, I’d like to tell you all of my encounter with an especially viscous enemy, The Door. The Door is encountered halfway through the game when we need to enter a building, and it’s its only entrance. The catch: The door is locked, can only be opened from the inside and we’re standing outside without a key. So what do we do? Contact Mission Support of course!

Support Team: “Oh look, it’s a door. Find a way to get in there!”
Lym: “…uh, yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. I wonder if there’s a key around here somewhere.”
Lym: (attacks various guards, none of which drop keys, crawls through the grass in search of keys without finding one)
Support Team: “Maybe you’ll have to find a way to get in there without having a key.”
Lym: (stares at the door, sits down in front of the door, shoots the door, explodes a mine in front of the door)
The Door: (is indestructible/does nothing)
Lym: “Mission Control, help me! It’s been ten minutes and I can’t think of anything else!”
Support Team: “Duh, it’s a door! It can’t be that complicated!”
Lym: “But, but–! I really can’t think of anything else!” ;__;

What do you actually have to do to get into the building? Oh, well, you know… You knock on the door and wait for someone inside to open it for you.

… … …So simple, yet so effective. It’s kind of brilliant.

But now, on with the plot! There’s a lot of ground to cover since we last saw our unlucky hero crawl under a bed while his ever-helpful support team (or, well, Para Medic) attempted to lift his spirits with talk about a recent Dracula movie. Well, recent as of 1964…

Escape! …but from what, the prison or the nightmare mini game?
Those of you familiar with the game, and by now I assume that’s everyone who’s still reading, will know what comes next after I explained last time that I saved in the prison cell, but let me say it anyway: WHAT THE HECK WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN WHERE AM I WHAT IS HAPPENING HOW DO I WHAT? WHAT. Dear game, I expected to wake up in the same prison cell that I saved my game in, not in an entirely different game in which some pretty protagonist fights… zombies? With chains? In an easily-breakable environment? Seriously, what the heck. (I googled it to find out that it’s a cleverly hidden demo for a game that was never actually made but wow, what a way to start the game up again. Snake actually complains about the nightmare to his support team after the demo is over and he wakes up.)

After we’re done stabbing rats with a fork, we use the radio frequency we got from the helpful smiley ghost (he held up a sign with the number on it at some point during the torture) to open the cell’s door (SEE? This is why I didn’t think of something as simple as knocking on that other door!) and eventually escape from both the building and the fortress of Groznyj Grad by slipping into the sewers, where we will eventually be cornered by a certain kitten with no way out but down a waterfall. And I know I’ve said this before, but our hero sure does a whole lot of falling during this story…

(Meanwhile, Eva continues to poke fun at Snake’s cluelessness and the subtext-blind parts of the audience:
Snake: “Eva, what happened to Ocelot?”
Eva: “Can’t get enough of him, huh?”
Snake: “He doesn’t trust you.” [...]
Eva: “I’m fine. I know how to handle him. Besides, I think he’s got his mind set on someone else right about now.”
Snake: (goes “?”)
Eva: “Figure it out.”)

I find it interesting that Ocelot wants to use his “lucky” bullet here, mainly because he rips it from his necklace but is later shown wearing it again, so he goes through the trouble of repairing that piece of string or finding a new one or whatever, just so that he can keep wearing the bullet from when he messed up at his and Snake’s first meeting. Kitten looks almost a little worried when he stares at the river down below and says his “Don’t die on me yet” before turning around and wandering back to the fortress so that he can be there when The Plot strikes next. XD

The Sorrow’s river and the waterfall cave
That’s it, The Sorrow is officially my favourite Pokémon Cobra, except probably for The Boss/The Joy herself. The entire river sequence is incredibly atmospheric, from our drowning protagonist finding himself wading through it while the trees on the riverbank (and maybe even the river itself) are burning, to The Sorrow introducing himself (broken glasses and bloody tears, whispering voice and everything; it should be cheesy, but somehow it works), to the walk down the river and the Fourth Wall-breaking puzzle at the end. Even though said walk was, let’s say, rather uneventful when I did it; you’re facing the ghosts of everyone you’ve killed in the game up until then, from the enemy redshirts to the other Cobras, and I love the tranquilliser gun a little too much. XD (My final death count for enemies was seven, and this includes four of the bosses.)

It still took me four tries and lots of hints from both Mission Control (they all give their “Game Over” quotes when you call them) and The Sorrow himself (who actually knows that you’re not there for the first time when you restart his boss battle via “Continue”) to figure out how to beat a boss who is already dead (by taking a revival pill, thus escaping the near-death experience that Snake was caught in ever since he nearly drowned in the real river). And in a game like that, I’m supposed to knock on doors. … okay, okay, I’ll give it a rest now, but really. With their love for Fourth Wall-breaking puzzles, The Sorrow and Mantis should meet over tea at some point in the afterlife.

Wow, the jungle area that Snake washed up in afterwards is beautiful. *__* It’s a brilliant green, there’s birds chirping all around and wind rustling in the trees and oh! Look! A butterfly! The whole forest is just so alive that it’s kind of stunning, it’s such a contrast to The Sorrow’s River. *sighs dreamily*
Where was I? Ah, The Sorrow. We get a bit more backstory for him here, both in a kind of post-battle dream sequence (The Sorrow asking The Boss to kill him in order to finish the mission she’s been given) and from Mission Support (giving a few more details about said mission) and it’s more backstory than any of the other miniboss Cobras get. Not that I’m complaining; I’ve already said that The Sorrow is my favourite. (Amusing detail #749274: There’s a picture of The Joy and The Sorrow that you get to see while Sigint talks about them and it’s shot from the same angle as the Volgin/Raikov photo earlier.)

The Joy and the Sorrow, sitting in a treeheeee~

Time to rendezvous with Eva in a cute little cave behind a waterfall (and get our hero his iconic eyepatch); and because of our river adventure and because she kinda drove her fancy motorcycle right through the waterfall, that also means we get to see the two of them in various states of undress again (well, Snake had been running around half-naked ever since he was captured) as Snake roasts a snake over the fire while she drapes herself all over him. It’s pretty much Mountain Top Scene redux, which is why I don’t really have much to say about it… not that I’m complaining about the visuals. You know me, I’m shallow. XD

The one thing that always gets me here is the bit where Snake reaches out to catch the butterfly/moth hovering around the fire and failing. Eva apologises and kisses him again (on the cheek, beneath the eyepatch, on the mouth) and it’s a very sensual scene and of course he pushes her away again. (I like Eva. I want her to get what she wants. And for all that this is part of her mission, I also think that part of what she wants is Snake, but of course there’s other stuff on his mind right now. Those two just work in the way that they, uh, don’t work. It’s a very good kind of heartbreaking.)

“There’s not a man alive who could resist my charms ^.~ … besides you of course.” Eva sums it up once they’re dressed and talking about The Plot again. She also gives him the explosives that he’ll need to blow up the hangar that the Shagohod is in, shaped like a heart, but somewhere inbetween scenes she has decided not to try and kiss him again., and he shows that he’s actually worried about her. Ah, I love these two. (Not that that was hard to miss from the way I’ve been writing. XD) And I love the way Eva talks about her bike and how important being able to ride it is for her.

The importance of names in the MGS!verse, part 482048: Snake asks Eva for her real name, but she just asks what’s wrong with “Tatyana.” If I’m not mistaken, he hasn’t given her his real name either, has he? Zero and The Boss both call him by it (Jack), while he joked to Para-Medic about being called John Doe. (So when he asks her her name in return, of course it’s “Jane Doe.”)

Twenty minutes were an entirely reasonable time limit, damnit!
By the way, have I mentioned already that The Sorrows camo, when worn by Snake, can sap the enemies’ stamina and makes it so that his footsteps don’t make a sound? I love it! <3 … Not as much as the sneaking suit you can find shortly afterwards though, mainly because it halves any damage and looks like a black version of The Boss's white sneaking suit. Hello symbolism.

Anyway, back at fortress and in the Shagohod's hangar, we fiddle around with the explosive (while I try to figure out whether I want to go "awwwww!" or get half a heart attack at Snake remodelling the heart into a butterfly and throwing it into the air (That thing goes boom on impact!), catching it and telling it "Gotcha this time. ") and set the timer to twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to get to the other side of the room, up a ladder and a few steps away from the building – an entirely reasonable time limit, you'll agree. Of course that doesn't take into account just how much the Plotty 4 like to talk: We run into Pikachu, kitten, Eva and The Boss again, while our helpful smiley ghost holds up signs informing us just how much of our "entirely reasonable" twenty minutes remain. Time's ticking…

Nothing really new here either, but a nice display of how things are developing over the course of this game: In his fourth hand-to-hand combat against The Boss, Snake still loses, but he's obviously getting better at it. Volgin still tends to give all his secrets away by gloating over the "captive hero" (cue more exposition about the Philosopher's Legacy), complete with an actual "Very well, I'll explain it before I kill you" quote. … As I keep saying, everyone in this game has watched too many James Bond movies, except for Snake, who remains largely genre-blind as a result. The Boss still doesn't like Volgin (but then again, who does? Other than Raikov.) and helps Eva out. Ocelot is still a show-off and it's so typical when he points one gun at Snake… and one at Volgin. When it comes down to it, kitten is on kitten's side, huh?

By the time we get to the actual boss fight (Snake vs Volgin, even though Ocelot really wanted to fight him instead), only five of our precious twenty minutes remain. Have I mention that it's a fricking difficult boss battle too? It would've been tricky even without a time limit, and with one, half of my continues (my total was 14) were thanks to it. *sighs* Guns that stop working properly, too much electricity, the time limit, Volgin's attacks in general hitting hard – I'm not even sure how I eventually made it through the battle.
Okay, so I didn't play entirely fair and tried masquerading as Raikov again. It does throw him off and he doesn’t attack you for a moment, and I’ll take all the help I can get in this fight.

Speaking of help, it comes from a (not entirely) unexpected side too: During the first half of the battle, Ocelot actually helps Snake out by throwing helpful items into the ring. Thanks kitten! “Whose side are you on?”, asks Pikachu. I’ll venture a guess and say the answer’s “Not on yours.” XD Anyway, at the halfway point/when Volgin has lost half of his health- or stamina bar, we’re treated to another cutscene of Volgin demanding Ocelot shoot Snake, which he of course doesn’t. (He actually shoots at Pikachu instead when he, pissed off that his orders aren’t being followed, shoots lightning at him. The bullets catch the lightning and Ocelot gets out of it without a scratch.)
Volgin tries the “I’m your commanding officer and you have to do what I tell you!” spiel with limited success. “Fight like a man, Volgin”, says kitten, echoing The Boss from one scene ago telling him (Pikachu) to “fight like a warrior.” We’re on the topic of names again, and Volgin doesn’t appreciate it to be addressed so directly by someone under his command… not that that impresses Ocelot terribly much, he just wanders off and leaves the second half of the battle to Snake, not before giving him his trademark hand gesture again. (The others have finally caught on to the presence of a ticking clock.)

Motorcycle chase! & Through the jungle
Snake barely makes it out of the hangar before the remaining explosives (a few had been found) go off, which is more than can be said for a few of the enemy soldiers who were still in there. (The game makes sure we see them struggling; I wonder if they would show up in The Sorrow’s river if that sequence took place later.) Eva awaits him on her beloved motorcycle (+side car this time) and tells him that they’ll have to make it not only out of the fortress, but to the lake… where The Boss will be waiting for Snake. “I don’t want you to fight her,” say Eva. Great, we all have something in common then, right? She demonstrates quite a bit more understanding here for what these two are to each other than she did on the mountain top, and before The Plot catches up with them, she tells Snake: “The Boss told me to tell you something… I’ve never seen someone with such clear eyes…” and, okay, I know that the “clear eyes” comment is the message she was told to give him, but that’s mainly because she clarifies it afterwards. For that moment, she sounds like she herself is talking about The Boss, rather than repeating what The Boss said about Snake. Awww.

Of course we can’t make it to the end of the game without fighting the Shagohod (Okay, so this Metal Gear Solid game features neither Solid Snake nor a Metal Gear, but the Shagohod is a close enough replacement, right?), which crawls out of its burning hangar, driven by Pikachu who does his best Liquid impression – “Snaaaake, it’s not over yeeeet!” So let’s jump into the side car and get away from that thing.
(I have to say that I don’t like any of the chase sequences or the vs Shagohod battle you fight from the motorcycle very much, but that might just be because I suck at it. I sucked at aiming even at the beginning of the game, I sucked at it even more after Snake lost an eye and as it turns out, having to aim from a moving vehicle, aiming at moving targets too, doesn’t really help. Uhm. Oh well, at least it looks very stylish.)

Kitten can never stay away from the action for too long, so he joins the chase on a motorcycle of his own and as it turns out, he drives about as well as Eva does! (But I can never figure out what goes on in that tunnel when he’s nearly hit by falling debris that later blocks his way. Snake shoots at something falling down there, but is it a different part of the ceiling (i.e. one he shoots at so that it won’t crush him and Eva) or the one that doesn’t hit Ocelot, and if it’s the latter, does he shoot it to block his path, to keep him from being crushed under it, or both? Somebody please tell me.)
Pikachu, meanwhile, doesn’t care much what happens to anyone who happens to stand in the Shagohod’s way, but we didn’t really expect him to care, did we? I’m mostly amused by Ocelot calling him a son of a bitch for it, which is, IIRC, the most expletive cursing we’ve heard so far in the series. Kind of surprising, actually.

Snake and Eva lure Volgin to a bridge that Eva’s planted explosives on beforehand, but say “We did it!” a bit too soon – of course the Shagood claws its way up the cliff/bridge for another boss battle. (Ocelot reaches the crumbling bridge too late to cross it and even drops his gun when he drags his bike around as to not to fall down there. Lost gun = unhappy kitten.)
Okay okay, kiss Snake for luck, Eva, as long as we get out of this chase sequence sometime today… Battle against the Shagohod, check, battle against Volgin standing on top of the Shagohod while powering the thing with his own electricity, check. Did I mention that it starts raining again in the second half of that fight?

“Who’s afraid of a little thunder?” indeed. I absolutely love the irony of Pikachu being killed by a bolt of lightning. XD (All the bullets he wears on his body explode from the lightning as well, so he makes for nice lil’ fireworks in the background as Snake and Eva (who can’t watch, even if it’s Volgin) celebrate their victory. Yeah yeah, not a pretty way to go, I know, I know, but it’s Volgin. Let me celebrate a little too. ^.~ *throws pom-pons*) Well done, helpful smiley ghost of rain and thunderstorms!

Eventually, even this long, long sequence of chase scenes comes to an end when the bike’s tank starts leaking fuel and they pretty much crash into a tree at some point.. good for me, not so good for our two heroes who get injured (and, in Eva’s case, half impaled on a branch). Eva tries the good old “Leave me behind and go on without me!” trick, but Snake won’t let her, surprising everyone when he tells her he can’t do that because he needs her. To fly the WIG, that is. Eva looked like she thought the exact same thing I did in that moment: “And you were so close!” XD
Anyway, they patch themselves/each other up, Snake gives her a gun, and they start heading towards the lake were the WIG that’s supposed to get them out of this pesky plot jungle is parked… and were, as Eva had said, The Boss is waiting.

A field of flowers
(By the way, did you know that one of the members of Mission Control (I forgot who it was) will explain to you that the name of the lake near which this final battle is fought translates to “the lake of destiny?”) I said two posts ago that The Plot is not an actual character, but I can’t help but imagine him sitting up there in one of the trees and emptying a bucket full of metaphors over the characters in this sequence. The flower field itself, The Boss and Snakes white and black sneaking suits (Damnit, The Boss blends in with the surroundings far too well. My poor old TV certainly isn’t helping either.), the three Ssnakes crawling around in it, and that’s just the more obvious stuff…

So, while Eva goes and gets the WIG ready for take off (not before she tells Snake to come back alive; “promise me!” she adds when he doesn’t react to that), Snakes steps into a clearing filled with beautiful white flowers to face his mentor – who proves that she’s taking the whole “hero’s journey” thing a little too serious.
You know the theory about how the villain will put obstacles in the hero’s path, but the hero overcomes them, learns from them and eventually, through them gains the skill and knowledge necessary to beat the villain in the end? Only the villain does of course not do it so that the hero can learn but to stop him… but every now and then, a “villain” is aware of the Hero’s Journey. The Boss sent the Cobras out not to stop Snake, but to help him learn, so that he can now beat her and carry on her legacy and all that… and, you know, become a worthy protagonist for future tales and all that. … Yeah, congratulations, The Boss, Solid Snake would like to tell you that your plan backfired rather spectacularly. XD

I’ll spare you with the details of the “why The Boss is the real hero of this mission” and just note in bullet points a few of my random observations:
- The Boss’s “to make the world whole again”/”circle of revenge” speech makes her sound like Naruto. (Ugh, I did not just say that. But I just recently caught up with the manga again after not reading it for quite a while, so Naruto’s speech to The Pain is still fresh in my mind.) And you know, when your videogame villain sounds a whole lot like a shonen manga hero, maybe it’s time to rethink our perspective… but then again, this is Big Boss’s “start of darkness” story.

- On the other hand, the whole sentiment of “who is a friend and who is an enemy can change with the times” is an ongoing theme; I’m mostly reminded of Solid Snake talking about himself and Frank/Fox/The Ninja. (There’s also kitten double-crossing everyone around him, but I suspect there’s reason behind his betrayals.)

- The series’s other recurring theme is also back: The Boss calls the Cobras her family and says that even though she can no longer bear children, she still has a family. (Incidentally, she is more of a mother to Snake than she was to her actual son who was taken from her.) Wait, aren’t the Cobras all dead by now? And she can’t even seem to see The Sorrow, but then again, she is certain that she will not leave this field of flowers alive either.

- Predictably enough, I love that The Boss calls The Sorrow her comrade and her friend long before telling us that he was also the father of her child. (Wait, I was actually joking when I sang that stupid Joy/Sorrow rhyme. Joking! Not that I mind at all. ^.^ *ships them either way*) When she talks about killing him and says that there was no enmity between them, I am again reminded of another Snake and a certain Fox. This series sure loves its motifs.

- Uh, Boss, I’m not about to question your skills, but what exactly were you doing on a battlefield in the Normandy when you were nine months pregnant? And honestly, whoever botched that C-section can go and join Liquid “I fail eighth grade Biology and therefore I hate you!” Snake; if that scar is from her c-section, then why does it reach up to her shoulder? Pffft. (Yes, yes, I know. Try to deliver a baby in the middle of a battle. That’s why I asked what she was doing there in the first place. ^.~ I know, I know, important mission. Tsk.)

- Come to think of it: Does kitten know whose son he is? And does The Boss know she’s his mother?

- If I’m not mistaken about the old MG games, that’s four games out of five that end with the protagonist facing a parent/mentor figure for the final battle. I can’t say anything about Solid Snake and Big Boss because I’ve yet to play MG/MG2, other than what the summary that came with MGS1 told me, but I love the contrast between the encounters in MGS2 and 3: Raiden loathes Solidus, but Naked Snake still loves The Boss, even if he hates what she makes him do.

- Noooooo, don’t blend in with the flowers like that, my TV reeeaaally doesn’t like that! (When The Boss throws Snake on the ground, the flower petals that sends flying are red though. ;_;)

- It took me embarrassingly long to realise that the post-battle cutscene stops being a cutscene for long enough to force the player to pull the trigger on The Boss themselves. It’s pretty much the opposite from the torture scene where I expected to be able to push buttons (and have it have an effect) and couldn’t. Oh game. I love it when you remember that you’re a medium with its own unique strengths.

- And all the flowers turn read. (… Damnit, white horsie, get our of there, you’re ruining the mood!) Snake catches one of the red petals; good thing we practised this with butterflies, huh? (When he’s on the plane later, the petal floats away, turning white again. Ah.)

- Not sure if I like the “The Boss’s snake-shaped scars slithers away from her body while turning into an actual Ssnake that vanishes into the flowers” metaphor thing or not. Hmm.

HEY! Don’t forget the kitten!
Oh. Right. can’t do that. So Ocelot manages to make his way onto the already flying plane, and while Eva is busy trying not to crashland the thing into the destiny lake, he and Snake are having a catfight in the back? demonstrate some more CQC. Turns out that Snake isn’t the only one who has learned a lot since they first met at the beginning of the game; even though Oclot ultimately loses, he keeps up for a good long time; in the second half of the battle easily imitating each of Snake’s techniques. (He actually comments on that, saying he’s “picked up a few new moves.” In the last few seconds, huh?) Curiously enough, after all that happens, kitten actually manages to make Snake smile – and by poking his eyepatch no less.

Snake gets his revolver back from Eva and Ocelot decides that it’s (once again) time for his lucky bullet to come into play: he loads one of the revolvers with it and does his fancy juggling again before letting Snake chose one: Quick-draw duel! (Heh. Is this really the only time where he’s actually allowed to finish his juggling routine? Well, considering the last time he was interrupted, Snake lost an eye, it’s no wonder we let him finish this time. XD) I love how comfortable Snake is during this whole thing – two more characters who just work.

And it’s time for The Importance Of Names In The MGS series again:
“What’s your name?”
“Snake.”
“No. Not that name. You’re not a snake, and I’m not an ocelot. We’re men, with names. My name is Adamska. What’s yours?”
“John.”
“Very well, John. Plain name. But I won’t forget it.”

See, kitten? That wasn’t so hard. All you had to do is ask nicely: So simple, yet so effective.

(For the record, I was too busy trying to twirl the gun the way he does (you can normally do that with a revolver in 1st person perspective, but apparently not here?) to actually shoot at him. *coughs* The cutscene afterwards actually reflected that, with Ocelot asking why Snake didn’t shoot him. Snake doesn’t answer. “Till we meet again. John.” Snake actually smiles at that too, and kitten ends up jumping into the lake below. Don’t drown! There are games that still need you for their plot! *smiles* Foolish little kitten.

Eve tempting the snake / The title of Big Boss
(more bullet points)

- That is one fancy room they’re in. It even has a fire place that annoying radios can (and are) thrown into. (Though I have to admit that the tiger rug made me laugh just like the horse did, it’s just a little too much. XD They have wine and music playing in the background and oh, have I mentioned that they’ve both survived the mission? Now if that isn’t a reason to celebrate.

- Oh! It’s actually Snake kissing Eva, that’s a surprise. Making up for all the things you didn’t do on the mission, huh? Please try not to roll into the fireplace. That would be kind of anti-climatic. Though it’s certainly not the fireplace’s fault that this scene is hot… just saying. (Yes yes, I’m very mature, I know. To be slightly less shallow, I’ll say that I love the dynamics they display here too. <3)

- Next morning! Say, ah… am I the only one who would find it kind of impractical to get dressed again before going to sleep? Hmmm, so many possibilities… and while we're on the TMI front, let me say that I find the idea that maybe they didn't have sex after all hot from both a narrative perspective and from the I'm-a-shallow-hormonal-fangirl-with-slightly-random-tastes perspective. (And yes, I know she pretty much flat-out states they slept with each other in her recorded message.)

- Blabla, Eva's still a spy and has already left by the time Snake wakes up, blabla real mission, blabla Adam and the Philosophers Legacy, blabla plot. You know the deal. I spent half of the scene wondering if Snake had only dreamt the previous scene. XD (No, I doubt he has, don't worry.)

- Snake gets dressed up in a fancy uniform to receive his famous title, the last of his iconic features that he was still missing. And I love that for all the shiny medals, the applause, the reporters taking photos, it's an empty honour, and one he doesn't feel. They think they're building up a hero, but what they have set up is a hero's fall. And nowhere is that more obvious than when they pin a medal on him and name him Big Boss.

- In the list of things the surviving characters did after the game is over, everyone's paragraphs scroll over the screen together, but the the "Les Enfants Terrible" project gets a whole screen all for itself. Wel, it is kind of important.

- During the credits, it never fails to amuse me that everyone has a motion actor (some minor characters even share one, like The Fury, The Pain and The Sorrow) while Ocelot has six, four for his gun twirling and juggling alone, one for CQC and one for the actual acting. XD

- Kitten, you are one sneaky bastard. What I love most about his post-credits phone conversation is just how extremely similar he sounds to his older self at the end of the MGS1 credits. His younger voice actor certainly did an amazing job here and can read me the phone book any day.

So, any final impressions?
Not much that I haven’t said over the course of these four long entries, really. I really like how well MGS3 stands on its own, while at the same time, it feels weird that it does/that it doesn’t connect more directly with the other games. But I’ve been told – hi Try! – that MGS4 will tie it in better with the other games in the franchise, and it’s not really a big complaint to begin with: thematically, MGS3 is very definitely a part of the series, even if it approaches some questions rather differently; compare, for example, Solid Snake’s view of what a soldier is with The Boss’s.

While we’re talking about minor complains, I still don’t really like this voice for Big Boss. It’s still Solid Snake’s in my head and doesn’t really want to fit this character who, all similarities notwithstanding, is after all still his own character. I might be in the minority here, but I would’ve preferred him to have his own voice.

The jungle was an amazing environment for this game. Groznyj Grad not so much, but we didn’t spent too much time inside there anyway. So how does the jungle compare to Shadow Moses and the Tanker/Plant? Hmm, I don’t know; I still have a soft spot for Shadow Moses, but as a location, I definitely prefer the jungle to the plant. Maybe that’s just me and greenery though. *g* And for the Quirky Miniboss Squads… I’ve said before that I’m not terribly impressed with the Cobras as individuals but that I adore their boss fights and I stand by that opinion. The Sorrow (and The Boss of course) kind of redeemed them, but their not my favourites.

Initially, I didn’t like the lack of a mini-map/radar and I’ve still missed it frequently, but Jana was right when she said that somehow, MGS3 makes the new system work regardless. The whole stamina/hunting element was also excellent and not nearly as stressful as I feared it would be… but then again, I did play on Easy. (You know, the more I play of this series, the more I look forward to replaying these games one day on a higher difficulty. This time around, I’m mostly playing for the plot/characters/whatever (no, really) and to get used to the various elements, and I tend to be picky with the challenges I like, but these games? they can actually pose a challenge I’ll like to face in earnest one day. Fun!

So yeah. Excellent game, excellent spy movie atmosphere and definitely worth rambling about in too-long entries. Thank you for reading!

Wh-what do you mean I’ve almost hit 6000 words? I didn’t I wasn’t going to but I wanted only… D: D: D:

Talk about spies and conspiracies…
So after meeting Snake on the mountain top and while Eva is busy making her way back into the villains’ main fortress, Snake and the audience observe a scene in said fortresses courtyard. It’s really nice of the bad guys to always have their important conversation outside where we can do that. XD But anyway, Pikachu is busy taking his anger issues out on that scientist guy who helped us to get to the mountain in the first place (not the one we’re supposed to save – yet) by stuffing him into a barrel and punching the thing with electrically charged fists, which turns out to be about as good for the man’s health as you’d expect. When he’s dead, kitten appears on the scene and they start talking about spies while I start wondering: Why is Ocelot even there?

Not in that scene, I mean. Why is he hanging around Volgin and The Boss and the Cobras at all? He wouldn’t be there if he wasn’t important to the main plot in some way, but so far all he has done is show off his fancy shooting abilities or be slapped around before he can finish doing just that, which is nice and all, but hardly a sufficient reason to even be in the game. And hey, this is Ocelot we’re talking about. I’m sure he’s hiding something. Preferable the real spy’s identity… or maybe there’s more than one? Because we already know about at least two at this point, don’t we? (If the now dead scientist’s transmitter and Eva in general count.) And Ocelot gets really insistent (again) when it comes to not suspecting “their comrades”. In any case, kitten, I’m so keeping an eye on you. (Oh wait…)

For the second time now, Ocelot displays some kind of morals, or at least more than certain other people around him… not that that’s terribly hard. And woah, the guy has guts, telling Volgin to his face that he doesn’t approve of his “methods” and not backing down even when Pikachu tells him that he’s in charge here and needs nobody’s approval. (Either that, or his survival instincts are on holidays. There was that whole reloading-in-plain-sight-in-the-middle-of-battle thing…)

When the topic shifts to Snake, that’s the sign for The Boss and Tatyana/Eva to show up again, and The Boss has even brought her pretty white horse again. I can’t help it, I still think the horse looks ridiculously out of place. (Am I missing something? Is this I trope I have never heard of because I’m not particularly familiar with spy movies?) But anyway, kitten gets to twirl around a weapon again, this time The Fear’s crossbow that The Boss throws in front of Volgin’s feet when she explains that two more of her Pokémon have been killed. (In the background, Tatyana is busy looking scared; this is actually the first time I’ve realised how different her body language is when she’s Tatyana than when she’s Eva; she drops her confidence and basically looks like she’s ready to bolt and run at a moment’s notice, only she never does. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, so I’m a bit embarassed that it took me so long to consciously notice that. ^^;;)

How, Pikachu wonders, could the Cobras, who are supposed to be the best at what they do, be killed by just one man? He’s probably thinking about spies again and how they could be helping Snake, but kitten turns out to be very willing to believe in Snake’s skill – “He’s good.” The way he says that sounds so appreciative that even the other characters comment on it, or at least Volgin does. (“Fallen for him?” Ocelot, it should be noted, doesn’t react to that.)

For the rest of the scene, we basically watch The Boss mention The Philosopher’s Legacy, whatever that is supposed to be, and after the other characters have left, kitten gets really suspicious about Tatyana (at this point it’s made clear without a doubt that she and Eva are the same person, not least because she shows really good reflexes when Ocelot points one of The Fear’s poisoned arrows at her throat. Whether he threatens her or gives her advice here or both is not exactly clear.

I’m not suspicious, I’m not suspicious, I’m so not suspicious, I’m…
Back to Snake who, remember, has to sneak into the main fortress to save Sokolov before he can be forced to complete the pseudo-Metal Gear, who is being held in an area to which a whooping two people have access: Pikachu, and Pikachu’s lover, the aforementioned Raiden-lookalike, a certain Major Raikov. So we have to find Raikov, steal his clothes, disguise himself as him and pretend that we’re not suspicious at all. (This is helped by a bit of fourth wall breaking: Ever since the beginning of the game, we’ve head a joke item in our inventory, a mask that makes Snake’s face look like Raiden. There’s no plot- or character reason why snake would carry such a thing around since nobody could foresee (especially at the beginning of the Virtuous Mission) that he would have to pretend to be someone who looks just like that later, but this is where that item comes in handy anyway. I’m not sure what to think about this; on the one hand the whole series is known for breaking the fourth wall, on the other, this bit is pretty important to the main plot and makes little sense in-game. Hmmm. Whatever. *handwaves*

Stealing Raikov’s clothes turned out to be a lot more complicated than you’d think. (And not just because we’re attacked by Pokémon #4, The Fury, on the way to the fortress. He attacks with a flame thrower in otherwise completely dark corridors, which means that Snake either got burned over and over again (which means that I had to pause the battle time and again to treat his wounds) or stumble around in the dark after the batteries for his night vision goggles ran out. It’s probably my least favourite MGS battle so far. Meh.) You see, to navigate the east wing of the fortress, where Raikov is prancing around like he owns the place, we have to disguise Snake as a scientist again… and again, the other scientists know that he’s not one of them and alert the guards. To make matters worse, Raikov is neither stupid nor blind – he will also see through Snake’s disguise if you give him the chance to get half a look at you – nor does he ever go somewhere alone… or at least he does it very rarely, which makes finding a place to attack him not an easy task at all. Oh, and have I mentioned that he will of course not only alert other guards but also shoot you, or that you have to get relatively close to him to identify him because his uniform is so very similar to everyone else’s?

(This is not helped by my lack of a sense of orientation; even though Mission Support told me continually to try the locker room in the south-west corner of the second floor, I needed half an eternity to actually find the room and realise that it had lockers in it… yeah, I felt appropriately stupid when I finally managed to drag Raikov there.)

We’re first introduced to Raikov when Eva talks about him on the mountain; there we get a scene of him walking through some corridors at the fortress and basically smiling at the camera. And that is so, so strange. I mean, not really, but the fact that he looks quite a bit like Raiden makes it so: Raikov’s whole demeanour is a lot more confident than Raiden’s (or maybe it’s just that Raikov isn’t sneaking around in enemy territory) and I don’t think we’ve ever really seen our pretty little protagonist smile like that.

(Excerpts from radio communications with Eva that amuse me more than they should, just in case anyone hadn’t caught onto the fact that sometimes our hero isn’t the brightest:

Eva: “That’s not going to work this time around. Raikov’s uniform is a special type that only he wears. You’ll have to get it directly from him. Normally I’m pretty good at getting men to take off their clothes, but it won’t work on him.”
Snake: (goes “?”)
Eva: “You, on the other hand, might have a better chance with him.”
Snake: “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Eva: “What indeed.”

and

Snake: “Eva, about this Major Raikov.”
Eva: “Yes?”
Snake: “You said he had colonel-class authorization, right?”
Eva: “Right.”
Snake: “But his rank is major. So how can he have colonel-class authorization?”
Eva: “Raikov is treated as an officer of equal rank with Colonel Volgin.”
Snake: “Treated as the same rank?”
Eva: “Yeah.”
Snake: “Even though he’s a major?”
Eva: “Right.”
Snake: “Why?”
Eva: “You don’t know?”
Snake: “No.”
Eva: “Even after seeing that photo?”
Snake: “Nope.”
Eva: “Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit slow?”
Snake: “What are you talking about?”
Eva: “I’ll leave you to think about it.”
Snake: “Wait a minute…”
Eva: “Gotta go.”

But anyway, after hours of running in circles in the east wing, cursing scientists and their alarm-ringing tendencies, calling Mission Support again and again and creating more than one time paradox because I don’t want to waste any health-restoring items on something htat’s supposed to be easy, I finally manage to get Raikov out of his clothes and into the closest locker and I have no idea what amuses me more: That his underwear is more conventionally sexy than Eva’s or that there’s a little lightning bolt printed on it to the side. Probably the lightning bolt. Good luck getting me to stop laughing; it’s almost adorable. XD (Note: Even though they’re both sleeping with Volgin, Raikov, unlike Eva, doesn’t have scars to show for it.)

And now we can finally stop sneaking around and hiding behind corners and do a bit of prancing-around-like-we-own-the-place of our own. Heeeeeh. (At this point, calling her will make Eva explain that even if we punch the guards in the face, they still won’t attack, and I kind of just had to try that. Turned out she was right. They’re scared enough of Raikov (or Pikachu, or both) to not only not question why Raikov is running so strangely (it’s still Snake’s character model and comes only with the “stealthy” running animation) apologise for the trouble they cause me if I hit them. They’re also very decidedly not surprised by these antics.)

So, things are going pretty well for Snake: He’s able to walk around without fear of detection, his mission is going just like planned, Mission Control is happy too and Major Zero happily exclaims that his disguise is so perfect that not even Raikov’s mother could tell the difference. Unfortunately, it’s not Raikov’s mum we need to fool… And predictably enough, this is where things are starting to fall apart.

Plot Happens…
Or, well, at least there’s a lot of talk about The Plot first: We observe Eva (dressed like Tatyana but definitively acting like Eva) getting some kind of device (all the data on the Shagohod, actually) from Sokolov, and threatening him afterwards with what looks like her deadly lipstick gun thing but turns out to be perfectly normal lipstick before she leaves the room so that Snake (who has taken his Raiden/Raikov mask off for this) can have another plot-important conversation about the Shagohod with the scientist. Blabla, super dangerous weapon, almost completed, blabla it’s all too late but what about if we just destroy it? The most notable thing about the whole conversation is really that Snake actually touches Sokolov (again? I’m pretty sure he did that in the prologue as well now that I think about it.), puts a hand on his shoulder and lets Sokolov do the same thing. He still stares at the ground a whole lot though.

Sokolov turns out to be pretty pessimistic about where this whole plot is going and doesn’t even want to try escaping because he believes he has nothing left that he could do in life anyway, and that he’ll “always will be a weapon scientist and can’t be anything else.” Dude, you remind me of another Metal Gear-building scientist who thought the same and did actually start a new life… too bad that won’t help you.

Enter Volgin who has come here in search for Raikov, for whom he had been waiting in his room (his words, not mine) and whose reaction to finding his lover (or so he thinks; Snake has put the mask on again) is… to grope his crotch, apparently. Twice, after Snake first moves away from him after a second. (Compare this to the president randomly groping Raiden and Raiden jumping halfway across the room.) He then stares at his hand for a bit and comes to the brilliant conclusion that the man before him is not Raikov at all. Great job, Pikachu, do you want a cookie?

So Volgin points a gun at Snake and you know, the whole thing wouldn’t be all that much of a problem, as Snake shows when he quickly manages to get out of the situation and throw Volgin on the ground, but then The Boss enters the scene (sans pretty horsie this time) and proceeds to hand his ass to him just as she did in the prologue and at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater. well, not exactly like that; he seems to have gotten better and can now hold his own against her for at least a little while, but ultimately still doesn’t stand a chance against her. However, when Pikachu sees his chance and tries to attack Snake now that he’s lying on the ground himself, The Boss steps in again and quickly subdues him too. When it comes to this kind of close quarter combat (that was, as we find out now, developed by her and Snake personally), nobody’s able to hold a candle to her. You go, The Boss! *cheers* wait… this isn’t actually going well…

If he’s going to kill Snake, The Boss wants to know after Pikachu gets up again. “Of course,” is the answer, “But first, I will make him pay for hurting Ivan.” And so he does. Let me tell you, watching him beat the already weakened Snake for about two minutes (electricity is involved too or it wouldn’t be Volgin) while The Boss leaves the room and tries very, very hard not to think about what’s happening in there and while Ocelot, who had been standing outside (Why?) stares at the closed door intently, hurts. W-well, not as much as this is hurting Snake, but it’s not pretty. And it’s not the end of it either.

…and there is nothing we can do against it.
When Snake regains consciousness (after we were allowed to save our game too, even though we didn’t get to talk to our safe person), we see… not a whole lot, actually. The screen remains black except for two things: The life bar in the upper left corner and the camo index/uniform status in the upper right. (The latter shows us that Sanke’s camo stats are in the red, meaning that he’s less than hidden from enemy sight (duh) and that he’s also naked (well, still wearing trousers but as far as the various clothes you can put him into in this game goes, that’s the minimum), which doesn’t bode well. And since this isn’t the first MGS game I’m playing, that means that I grab my controller (that I hat put aside for the cutscene) again nd wait for the inevitable button mashing mini game that goes along with torture scenes in this series while I listen to Volgin slowly killing Sokolov and Tatyana begging him to stop, to no avail. Volgin audibly turns toward Snake, I remind myself that I really such at button mashing mini games but am determined to try anyway and indeed, here we go, Pikachu’s beating Snake some more, the life bar starts to drop and…

… wait. Where is my “press this button rapidly” display?
Where is my mini game?
Why is Snake’s life bar dropping and why can’t I do anything against it?
*runs around in more that a little panicky circlesaaaaaaaah*

Well done, game, well done. Playing with a Lym’s expectations like that. There’s something oddly terrifying about watching your character’s life bar drop like that and to only be able to sit there and watch. Which I’m sure is exactly the effect they were going for, so yeah. Well done, it’s definitely working.

We eventually shift out of Snake’s viewpoint to observe the rest of the scene: The reason for the blank screen was, predictably enough (if I wouldn’t have been too busy panicking to think about it), that there’s a bag over Snake’s head and he’s dangling from the ceiling with his hands bound over his head. Oh, and the rabid Pikachu is just emptying a bucket of water over him. While Volgin goes through the “telling the victim what he’s going to do before he does it (hello more electricity) and asking plot-related question” (How much does Snake know about where the Philosopher’s Legacy is being kept? Honest answer would be, Which legacy and what are the Philosophers. No-one ever tells Snake anything. This goes for a surprising number of Snakes, come to think of it.), we find out that there are more people in the room than just Snake, Pikachu and Tatyana/Eva (and the now dead Sokolov).

Hello Ocelot. I know I’m repeating myself but what are you doing here? And “enjoying the show” is not a valid answer. Observing him throughout the ten minute cutscene is interesting though: He starts out looking disgusted when we first see him leaning against one of the walls. That’s not the look he ends the scene with. When we see Snake wetting his pants – and boy is Volgin ever happy about that – kitten’s hand goes to the bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that jammed in the scene where he first met Snake and Snake gave him the advice about using a revolver. And I really want to know what’s going on inside that pretty head of his at that moment.

Even though The Boss shows up – and oh look, that means we have all the important characters gathered together in one scene ones again. They sure like doing that – and informs everyone that Snake isn’t going to talk because she trained him not to (not to mention, I thought, that he doesn’t know anything anyway; compare this to kitten in the first game who flat-out states that Snake doesn’t know anything and that getting information out of him is the last thing on his mind), that doesn’t stop Volgin from continuing to beat Snake and asking his question… and being a very, very typical Bond villain while he’s at it – he‘s actually the one who tells us what the Philosopher’s Legacy is (a whole lot of money, apparently) and where exactly it, or at least a record of its many locations, can be found (the underground vault of the fortress we’re in right now). The Boss and Tatyana nod to each other when he says that; looks like they got more info they wanted out of this than Pikachu himself. (I get why Eva would be interested, but I still have no idea what The Boss’s intentions are. Suuuspicious.)

Eventually, Volgin finds a transmitter on Snake and before anyone else can say anything, The Boss claims that she put it her so that her Pokémon could track him down and give the player most interesting boss battles, but Pikachu isn’t convinced – and kitten is smiling. Did that just draw attention away from where he wouldn’t want it? Like himself? *pokes kitten* Volgin didn’t trust The Boss at the best of times and he definitely isn’t trusting her now, so he demands some kind of proof that she is not secretly on Snakes side, for example… take a knife and cut out his eyes.

For those of you who are only familiar with the series through my ramblings (Is there anyone like that still reading this? I’d love to know if that’s the case. ♥), I’ll point you towards the lovely little fact that Big Boss, as this Snake will be called eventually, is known for wearing an eyepatch. …yeah, I know.

The Boss looks to Eva, who shakes her head, and have I mentioned recently that they’re making me curious? There’s a lot of non-verbal communication going on here, and this one doesn’t seem to be making terribly much sense as of yet, but I’ll have to keep it in mind. I’m sure it’ll all come together eventually. Also, as The Boss steps closer to Snake (only at this point is the bag taken from his head), Ocelot grabs Eva’s arm but she yanks free of it and both of them watch The Boss unsheath her knife and point it at Snakes eye… the left one, ironically, when we know that’s not where he’ll later wear the patch. Snake himself can’t look away either, and I have to say I’m glad to see him panicking; stories have a tendency to overplay the stoicism at points. He’s trembling. His relief when Eva steps in an stops The Boss is as visible as he can finally look away/at the ground again.

And this is where Ocelot steps in and starts Tatyana of being the spy. When she asks him what he’s talking about, she looks to the side quickly and moves her head a little as if to give him a sign or something or to ask him what the hell he’s doing on a different level as if, I don’t know, they’d been working together but he’s suddenly ruining the plan or something. Which doesn’t make terribly much sense, but at this point many things don’t and I’m one confused Lym.
Kitten also thinks it’s a good idea to grab one of her breast, for which she slaps him – and that’s so Eva, not Tatyana – and Pikachu is ready to comment again and ask if he’s taken a fancy to her this time – and Ocelot is very quick to deny that and to take up his gun juggling again to kill her (which Volgin has no problem with; he’s a lot more protective of Raikov than he ever is of Tatyana). Some fancy and surprisingly threatening juggling later, the gun that’s actually loaded with a bullet comes up… and Snake decides to return the favour and save Eva this time. He tackles Ocelot – quite a feat when you remember that he’s still dangling from the ceiling – the gun flies from his hand, only he had kindasortasomehow already had a finger on the trigger and the gun goes off right beneath Snake’s eye. The right one, this time. bye bye, right eye. It was nice knowing you. ;__;

And as if she hadn’t been about to do something similar just two minutes ago, The Boss goes and slaps kitten for it. Volgin, now apparently bored, leaves and orders Tatyana to follow him while Ocelot goes and stabs Snake(?) before complimenting him on surviving Volgin’s torture… and telling him that “it’s really not that bad” and “the ultimate form of expression”, all while sounding affectionate.

Uh, kitten? Next time, just try flowers.

One after the other, the remaining characters leave too, but not before making the situation worse: The Boss shoots Snake in the leg while telling him to run (Uh, lady, you just shot him in the leg…) while her smiling hooded ghost friend is hovering behind her holding up a sign with some numbers for Snake to see (WTF?) and Eva (now very much Eva again) whispers something about an escape route in his ear… and only now does Snake realise that Tatyana is, in fact, Eva.

Let’s hide under the bed! It’s a tradition!
Snake is brought to a prison cell where I’m very happy to see that not only is there a bed, no, I can also make Snake crawl under it, just like I did with another Snake in a different prison cell after a different torture scene. Why? because I can, that’s why. (Let me say I was very disappointed when there was no bed for Raiden to hide under.) From there, I call Mission Control and am vaguely surprised that the radio that Snake had been wearing all the time hasn’t short-circuited long ago… but I’m definitely not complaining, especially since the support team is actually, you know, supportive. Go talk to them, Snake. You’ll need it.

And while Para Medic tries to cheer him up by mentioning movies again, but unfortunately picks one about vampires when it was established in an earlier conversation about bats that he is scared of them (though he doesn’t call it that of course), Snake worries that he’ll have nightmares about vampires now. Better vampires than the plot, I say, save my game, switch the console off and finish this post.

When we last saw Our Hero, he had just failed to save the kidnapped scientist from some group or another even though he was handle the overeager kitten just fine, mainly because his mentor and her Quirky Miniboss Squad had teamed up with a rabid Pikachu so that the scientist builds them a giant war thingie. The important part is that we’re now standing in this jungle in the middle of… somewhere and have a reason to run into all these crazy people. Sounds like fun?

Kittens Want Attention! Bond Girls Have Boobs!
Back in the place where we first met Sokolov and the kitten a week (of in-game time) ago, we’re introduced to yet another new character… new to Snake, that is. Eva, who comes riding not on a white horse but on a motorbike, is quick to introduce herself and her boobs to Snake who… isn’t really paying attention. (She’s actually the same woman we saw on the helicopter with The Boss, Ocelot and Volgin.)

They talk about The Plot for a while with Snake sitting on a bench and fiddling with the shiny new gun that Eva just gave him and her trying to behave like a proper Bond girl. The whole seduction thing does not work terribly well, what with Snake shuffling away from her when she sits down next to him and not meeting her eyes and all that. I mention this because I find it interesting: Granted, she can’t see the very similar camera angles with which the two scenes were shot, but she cannot not realise that this moment with Snake mirrors her earlier scene with Volgin almost 1:1 as far as body language is concerned, only she herself has switched roles. (Unlike Volgin, she backs off when she realise that she’s not wanted… for now. Switching the gender of the involved characters around also helps in making this scene less obviously creepy; Volgin might be a rapist but Eva is not.)

Oh, and everyone’s favourite kitten is back again too! He has taken Snake’s advice to heart and is now using a revolver… which he’s twirling around and generally showing off and it’s a very fancy thing and is engraved with what looks a lot like a snake skin pattern and look look isn’t it great, isn’t our kitten great? Unfortunately for him, Snake is paying him about as much attention as he was paying Eva a second ago, but when Ocelot points the gun at him, he at least takes the time to point out that kitten “doesn’t have what it takes to kill him” – which he means literally, because Ocelot had ran out of bullets because the revolver holds fewer bullets than the automatic gun he was previously using. Snake had kept count of how many shots had fallen… Ocelot had not. Thwarted again! But you just wait, Snake! We’ll meet again!

We do a bit later and after Eva has gone back to wherever the rest of the villains hang out to play Volgin’s pet again. Kitten has found quite a unique solution to the lower capacity problem: He has brought two revolvers to this battle (which is also the game’s first boss fight) and now wields one in each hand. Not without spinning them around some more and building up the general atmosphere to feel like that of a spaghetti western, just to remind me why I initially started out calling him cowboy kitty. (He also meows for backup again.) I mention all this because he’s such a ridiculous show-off and it amuses me greatly.

This is also where he acquires his… thing for reloading his revolver in the middle of battle, which might or might not explain why him talking about it years later in MGS1′s first boss battle sounds so much like cheesy dirty talk.
You know, that makes me think of something… the boss battle, not the talking. Ocelot manages to be the first boss chronologically both in-game (her in the prequel MGS3) and on a meta level (in MGS1; although that one only works if we don’t count Metal Gear one and two) and it makes me wonder if he’ll also be the last boss in MGs4, which is the final game in both senses (not counting the upcoming unnumbered games). I think I would really like that. :3 (Don’t tell me if I’m right; as usual, I want to find out for myself.)

BEEEEEEEES! SPIIIIIDEEER– oh wait, those aren’t spiders. Move on, nothing to see here. Also, Photosynthesis! And a really bad disguise.
To get the “disguise” thing right out of the way: At some point you have to sneak into a lab and dress like a scientist. Guards won’t attack you, but other scientists will eventually realise that you’re not one of their own and alert the guards. Let’s just say that the only way this can possibly work is if we believe that the guards are either half-blind or very, very slow. Because Snake does not make a convincing scientist. At all. Even the way he walks looks suspicious! For some reason, this also amuses me very much.

It’s time to fight three of the game’s bosses now that we’ve got the kitten battle out of the way. Very little happens in terms of plot between each of these fights, so I’ll skip it. I’ll also skip the description of me wandering around in a very, very, very dark cave for half an hour, with such helpful tips from Mission Control as “Find a torch!”. BUT I CAN’T EVEN SEE WHERE I’M GOING! Let alone where a torch is, damnit! … I had put the game down for a few weeks right before this, so I had forgotten that there is a map to be found somewhere in the main menu. Ahem.

Anyway, Quirky Miniboss #1: The Pain. Also known as the guy who runs around covered in bees and who spits hornets at you. Because they apparently live inside his body. I don’t even want to know how this is supposed to work. Let’s just say his face is covered with swells from dozens of dozens of stings and why is he still alive I don’t even know what hey stop sending those beasts after me aaaah wait let me jump into this conveniently placed pool of water! … Not sure what else I can say about this guy, other that that I at this point I was wondering if he kept yelling “The pain, the pain!” because he meant it litterally or because it was his codename. i should find out a little later…

…when I faced Quirky Miniboss #2: The Fear. (By the way, you fight him in a part of the jungle that was devoid of any enemy activity the first time you passed through it – not so on the way back. I’m telling you, I knew that place was suspicious!) Guy wants to be a spider, climbs trees, can make himself invisible, throws poison darts and hops around from tree to tree a lot. Also has a very long tongue for some reason. (The last two points remind me of Vamp’s boss battle; the camouflaging however made me very glad I had learned my lesson during the fight with the Ninja in MGS1 and remembered to equip the thermal goggles.) I loved the battle; it was intense. <3 It was also interesting to see that his stamina bar dropped so fast and that he had to go out of his way to hunt down food during the fight; I finally understood why after I got his uniform afterwards for draining his stamina bar instead of killing him (he exploded anyway; all the Quirky Minibosses do) and put it on – it raises the camo index, making you harder to spot by enemies (good!), but at the cost of depleting your own stamina bar a lot faster than usual (decidedly not good.).

Anyway, he too kept yelling "The Feeeaaaar, The Feeeaaaar!" during the battle, and, you know, I've already brought one of the critters into this, so I might very well do it again: Animal-themed creatures/people with a tendency to repeat their own name? Clearly they're all Pokémon! … Wait, does that make The Boss, who seems to be a lot more eloquent, a Pokémon trainer? And does her unit consist of as many people as it does because you can never carry more than six Pokéballs with you at the same time? Is Snake her sixth Pokémon? Is kitten really a Meowth? And what have I just gotten myself into?

So, on to Pokémon #3: The End. Reeeally old L.D.S.K. sniper who’s so in tune with nature he can photosynthesise. He’s so one with the foret, his boss music are chirping birds and the rustling of wind in the trees. And you better prepare for a long, long battle… and no saving! (The game is very assertive about that, to the point where you’re safe person asks you if you’re reall sure you want to do this, because, you know, she has this feeling that something bad might happen if you do… this is something I knew about this game before: If you save and then wait a few days, Snake will fall asleep, which means The End can sneak up on him and carry him to the prison all the way back to where you disguised yourself as a scientist and you have to start the battle anew. if you do, however, wait a week or longer before playing again (or just mess with the PS2′s internal clock), game mechanics play out in your favour: When you come back, The End will have died of old age. … I watched that scene on youtube and it’s really anticlimatic, to say the least. <.<)

Anyway, long battle. Very long battle. Better do some hunting every now and then and hope to whittle down Turtwig's health or stamina… it's an interesting battle to say the least, made even more intriguing by the fact that this peculiar Pokémon can do something no other boss I've ever met in any game I've ever played can do: He can leave the screen and wander off into a different part of the map. (The battle takes place on not one but three huge maps. Good luck finding him…) Once the battle’s done, his leaf-like uniform whithers along with him, which feels strangely poignant.

Anyway. Even though the battles themselves are great, I have to say that so far I’m rather underwhelmed by this game’s Quirky Miniboss Squad and they have yet to grow on me the way Foxhound and Dead Cell did. Maybe it’s the lack of individual backstories? Speaking of story, there was one plotty bit between the fight that’s actually worth mentioning.

Oh look, it’s all the important characters sans Snake in one spot! Quick, somebody take a photo!
Well, Snake is there to overhear the scene, but he isn’t seen by any of the others and doesn’t interact with them, so. Nothing really important is talked about either, so I’ll just go through the bits of actual Stuff Happening quickly.

- Kitten shows off again, but because he’s not trying to impress Snake this time, he actually comes across rather menacing. (Okay, juggling three revolvers still looks a bit ridiculous, but the set-up isn’t; one of them is only loaded with one bullet and he keeps pulling triggers while he juggles them, directing him at Sokolov whom he’s trying to… intimidate, probably? Nah, he’s mainly still just showing off. The Boss appears and tells him off, not before Sokolov continues what is apparently becoming an MGS tradition that says that once a game, a scientist has to wet him- or herself out of fear.

- Pikachu also shows off, mostly to establish himself as one of if not the most hateable character in this series, as if we’d have any doubts about that, using his lighting powers to torture “Tatyana” (aka Eva), as if groping her breasts while holding her up by the hair so that her feet don’t touch the ground wasn’t bad enough. You know, just in case you wondered where kitten will later get his ideas. Ouch.

- Unrelated to any of this, I keep saving my game more often than I have to just to hear more conversations between Para-Medic and Snake. her being geeky about sci-fi and horror movies’ special effects is too cute, and whether they talk about James Bond (“From Russia With Love”?! And you’re bringing that up right after the kitten fight?) or War Of The Worlds (“When I was little, my dad though the radio play was real! Now I’m forever scared and watched the film version with my eyes closed!” – “So you didn’t watch it! – “I did!” – “Did not.”), their banter is so, so adorable. I’m pretty sure that with all the options the game provides, I’m not actually supposed to ship it, but I think I kind of do. XD (Kind of, over the radio. Putting her into the same room with him probably wouldn’t work half as well, and at the end of the day they come across more sibling-y anyway, so no need to go into Our Hero’s intimacy issues. Are MGS heroes contractually obliged to have some, by the way?)

The Mountain Top
(Edit: So much of this scene’s meaning relies on body language, so if you’d rather watch it than just go by my babblings alone, you can do that here. The image quality isn’t too great, but it’s serviceable.)

- After climbing a really (really, really) long ladder to get from the forest where we fought Turtwig to a nearby mountain (climbing the ladder takes so long that they started to play the game’s opening song just to make it more interesting), we meet up with Eva again in a hut on the mountain so that she can give Snake a plot-important key and provide us with… a whole lot of fanservice really, seeing as she’s dressed in a bra and 80s-sytle underpants and nothing else at the time Our Hero enters. Some people’s enjoyment might be diminished by the style of the panties but I think they’re a nice touch. ^^ And much like Snake (who makes his presence known almost immediately when she doesn’t seem to realise that she has company), my attention zips right past “Boobies!” and “Oh look, half-naked woman!” and zooms in on her scars. (This does not really surprise anybody.)

(The conversation goes something like, “Where did you get those cuts?” – “The Colonel.” – “What? He found out that you’re a spy?” – “Ahahaha, no, if he had, I would already be dead. This is just his hobby. *spits*”) She turns her back to him as she talks about Volgin, he reaches out to touch one of her scars. This is the only time we’ve ever seen him reach out to someone (close quarter combat excluded for obvious reason), and it’s when he’s sympathising with her having been hurt.
“Does it look that strange to you?” – “No, I’m the same, scars all over.” – “Can I see?” She turns around to face him, puts a hand on his shoulder – and he backs away immediately, “No.” No, of course not. That would put him in a similarly vulnerable position, or at least make his more obvious, and he can’t want that. Can’t.
(Oh game. You’ve needed a while to get to this point, but you’re slowly but surly working your way up to breaking my heart again.)

They start talking about The Plot (and noodle soup, and a Raiden lookalike) again for a while after he tries to draw the general attention away from his and back to her scars and she gets dressed and somehow spins the possibility of kissing him into the conversation, with the camera nicely focusing on his lips as she says it, just because.

(Unrelated: In the plot conversation, Eva also mentions that it will be important to fly some kind of… flying vehicle later, which Snake says he can’t do, but don’t worry, Eva has the necessary skill set. I mention this because it’s something we’ve seen before… or which we’ll see in the future, hello prequel, with Solid Snake, who can’t fly a helicopter… but Otacon can.)

Eventually, Eva starts being curious about Snake and The Boss, which ends with him saying that she’s like his mother and his master and Eva being very confused and asking if they were lovers. It was, says Snake, deeper than that (This is the second time we hear a Snake hear “lovers” and say “Nah, deeper than that”, though the other Snake wasn’t talking about a relationship involving him.) and that half of him belongs to his mentor and— you know, I really really like Eva, but her display of Not Getting It here is rather off-putting. (Do you love her? Do you hate her? Youreamanandawomanithastobeoneoftheother!) She does a good job of reminding him that part of his mission is to kill The Boss though, which he very clearly prefers not to think about.

As he talks about the Boss, Eva puts his arms around her neck and at this point I was honestly surprised he let her. Part of it, I’d say, his him being lost in thought, and him not being averse to human touch per se; part of me is convinced that shoving her away would hurt her and at this point he’s projecting too hard to ever want to do that.

She can, says she after a while, fall in love if it’s part of the mission, even with him. And down goes her suit’s zipper again to show us that she still has breasts, and now she does kiss him. He doesn’t kiss back. He doesn’t react at all, just stands there and doesn’t look her in the eye. Eventually, she even asks if something’s wrong, but Plot Happens before he can answer (or avoid and answer), and both the scene and my post come to an end.

(There is a cuscene after this before you can next save your game, but I’ll cover it in the next entry.)

Final Fantasy II, first released on the NES in 1988 (I played through the 20th anniversary version on the PSP), is (one of) the black sheep in the series and after I’ve played it, I have to say that I can’t understand why. But I think the fact that it’s so very different from the original Final Fantasy and its unusual level up system had something to do with that. In a way, FF2 follows a trend seen in various NES-area sequels: Think of how radically different Zelda 2, Suber Mario Bros. 2 (not the “Lost Levels” game) or Castlevania II were from their respective predecessors. The creators dared to do something different, the fans didn’t like it, so all these series returned to their roots for the third parts (and beyond), and of course now people complain about rehashed sequels. Ahahaha.

But I digress. As different as FF2 is (I had, for example, always assumed that the FFs I through V all followed the “save the crystals, save the world” storyline, but as it turns out, II is again the odd man out and doesn’t have crystals at all.), almost all of the elements first introduced here would later become staples of the series (an airship-related character named Cid, an evil empire, dragoons… not to mention characters; FF1 didn’t really have those, or at least not to this extend).

Simplistic as both of them were, I enjoyed both the plot (which included a surprising number of elements) and characters (many of which would join you as a playable party member for a while) and was surprised by the story itself especially. (At times it felt like a very, very basic version of the good old Suikodn storyline. You know, minus the Runes and Stars of destiny and plus the world-saving teenagers.) Especially for 1988 standards, there were a surprising amount of loving details to it.

Gameplay-wise, I have to say that ironically enough, I thought that the changes to the level up system were a breath of fresh air. At just below 14 hours, FF2 is a short game, but I think it had exactly the right length… well, it helps that I didn’t really have to grind for “levels” or money at any point after the first hour, so at least for the GBA and PSP version the “This game is such a grindfest!” complains should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Bonus points: There’s pretty much no Lost On The Worldmap syndrome going on; you always have a pretty good idea where to go. Less time spent wandering around aimlessly = more time for tiny little charming plot bits!

Below is an (incomplete) list of FF2 elements that we’d see again in later instalments as well as a few more general observations. This is where my obligatory spoiler warning goes (up to the ending), though does anyone even care about spoilers for this game? (There is one end-game spoiler for Kain of FF4 in there though.)

-> The Final Fantasy series always liked reusing names: I’m wondering if the twon of Paloom helped name the FF4 character Palom, or if FF9′s Salamander (“Mahagon” for those of you who played the German translation) was named that because of the FF2 town of Salamand. (Given that pretty much everything in IX is a callback to earlier games in the series… it’s likely.) There are more obvious cases though, such as the town of Mages, Mysidia (also present in FFIV) or a dragoon who goes by the name of Highwind (also the last name of FF4′s dragoon Kain).

-> A prince who acts like/thinks of himself as a coward, who joins the party and learns a thing or two about courage from the rest of the group and who later goes on to rebuild his country that has fallen in the empire’s attack. Am I talking about FF4′s Edward or about Gordon from this game?

-> Leila falls into the same “purple-haired female pirate who joins the party” type as FF5′s Faris, which makes the reveal of Faris’s gender early on even less of a surprise.

-> The antlion from FF1 is back, again as a normal enemy. It’ll show up as a boss in at least two other Final fantasys.

-> The “swallowed by a whale” storyline is thousands of years old and appears in this game as well when Firion, Maria, Guy and Leila are swallowed by Leviathan. That’s also the fate that’s thought to have befallen Rydia in IV, and Kingdom Hearts does it again, even though that is also part of their Pinocchio arc. And then there’s that one sidequest in VI… no Leviathan involved here… in XII it’s an airship that goes by this name that captures our heroes at one point and I’ll stop making comparissions now or I’ll end up at X’s final dungeon.

-> The whole bit with Leon, friend of the heroes who changes sides, sides with them again in time for the final boss and leaves when everyone else is celebrating the Happy End looks like a prototype for Kain’s arc in IV.

-> One of my favourite bits to end this list: To get into Kashuan Keep, you have to ring the Goddess’s Bell; its sound opens the sealed door. The same mechanic applies to the doors and bells of Gizarmaluke’s Grotto and some doord in the kingdom of Burmecia in IX.